This year’s Nail Technician of the Year finalists wowed us with their expertise and dedication to the nail industry. On the next few pages, you’ll get to meet all six of them and find out why they’re among the best in the industry has to offer.

NAILS wouldn’t be celebrating its 20th anniversary if it weren’t for the support of many manufacturers in our industry. To help us celebrate this landmark, we talked to the top brass at several companies that have been around from our very beginning.

When we told Elsbeth that we were shooting a teen cover to go with our cover story on teenagers, she conducted an informal poll of teenage girls in her neighborhood to see what they like to wear on their nails.

This month, in our look back at images of ourselves and our industry, we focus on advertisements. Although many of these ads look quaint now next to the more recent ads, most of them were still high impact at the time and the best of the bunch.

All-in-one retailers complete with salons and professional products are popping up left and right. Should smaller salons take coven or is there something the beauty industry can learn from these salon superstores?

At one time or another, we’ve all come across that newfangled product that was created way ahead of its time and just didn’t seem to catch on with the masses. Or information that we once believed true is in fact false. This is certainly true for the nail industry. Over the years, products have appeared on the market that didn’t work as expected and others have even been reincarnated into something quite different than what they were intended for. The following is NAILS pick of regrets. We’ve even thrown in some of our bad covers and bad advice for extra measure.

NAILS talked to some of the top nail technicians in the industry, and adding our own historical perspective, we came up with this list of product innovations dial have most impacted the way you work today.